Todd McFarlane (/məkˈfɑrlɪn/; born March 16, 1961) is a Canadian cartoonist, artist, writer, toy designer and entrepreneur, best known for his work in comic books, such as the fantasy series Spawn.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, McFarlane became a comic book superstar due to his work on Marvel Comics' Spider-Man franchise, on which he was the artist to draw the first full appearances of the supervillain Venom. In 1992, he helped form Image Comics, pulling the occultanti-hero character Spawn from his high school portfolio and updating him for the 1990s. Spawn was a popular hero in the 1990s and encouraged a trend in creator-owned comic book properties.

Since leaving inking duties on Spawn with issue No. 70 (February 1998), McFarlane has illustrated comic books less often, focusing on entrepreneurial efforts, such as McFarlane Toys and Todd McFarlane Entertainment, a film and animation studio. In September 2006, it was announced that McFarlane would be the Art Director of the newly formed 38 Studios, formerly Green Monster Games, founded by major league baseball pitcher Curt Schilling.[1] McFarlane used to be a co-owner of the National Hockey League's Edmonton Oilers but sold his shares to Daryl Katz.[2] He is also a high-profile collector of history-making baseballs.

In the early 1980s, McFarlane attended Eastern Washington University on a baseball scholarship, and studied graphic art.[7][10] He sought to play baseball professionally after graduation, but suffered a career-ending ankle injury in his junior year. He subsequently focused on drawing, working in a comic book store to pay for the rest of his education,[10] and sharing a trailer with his then-girlfriend, Wanda.[7]

Seeking to find work drawing comics, McFarlane sent out dozens of submissions each month to editors, totaling over 700 submissions in total, most of which were in the form of pinups. Half resulted in no response, while the other half resulted in rejection letters, though he received some constructive criticism from a few editors. One of them, DC Comics' Sal Amendola, gave McFarlane a dummy script in order to gauge McFarlane's page-to-page storytelling ability. Amendola's advice that McFarlane's submissions needed to focus page-to-page stories rather than pinups led McFarlane to create a five-page Coyote sample that he initially sent to Uncanny X-Men editor Ann Nocenti at Marvel Comics, who passed it along to Archie Goodwin and Jo Duffy, the editors of the Marvel imprint Epic Comics, which published Coyote. They in turn passed it onto Coyote creator Steve Englehart, who reached out to McFarlane to offer McFarlane his first comic job,[7] a 1984 backup story in Coyote.

In 1988, McFarlane joined writer David Michelinie on Marvel's The Amazing Spider-Man, beginning with issue 298. McFarlane rendered Spider-Man's webbing with far more detail. Whereas it has essentially been rendered as a series of X's between two lines, McFarlane embellished it by detailing far more individual strands, which came to be dubbed "spaghetti webbing".[12][13] McFarlane was also the first artist to draw the first, full appearance of Eddie Brock, the original incarnation of the villain Venom. He has been credited as the character's co-creator, though this has been a topic of dispute within the comic book industry. (See Eddie Brock: Creation and conception.)

McFarlane's work on Amazing Spider-Man made him an industry superstar. His cover art for Amazing Spider-Man No. 313, for which he was originally paid $700 in 1989, for example, would later sell for $71,200 in 2010.[14] In 1990, after a 28-issue run of Amazing Spider-Man, McFarlane told editor Jim Salicrup he'd grown tired of drawing other people's stories and would be leaving the book with issue No. 328 to write his own work.

Salicrup offered McFarlane a new Spider-Man book, prompting the launch of a new monthly title simply called Spider-Man, which McFarlane both wrote and illustrated. Spider-Man No. 1 sold 2.5 million copies,[15][16] largely due to the variant covers that were used to encourage collectors into buying more than one edition. McFarlane wrote and illustrated Spider-Man's first 14 issues, as well as #16; many issues of which were crossovers with characters such as Wolverine, X-Force, and Ghost Rider. After issue No. 16 (Nov. 1991), McFarlane left the book due to creative clashes with new editor Danny Fingeroth.[17] He was replaced on the title by future Image Comics co-founder Erik Larsen.

McFarlane then left Marvel with six other popular artists to form Image Comics, an umbrella company under which each owned a publishing house. McFarlane's studio, Todd McFarlane Productions, published his creation, the occult-themed Spawn. Upon release, Spawn No. 1 sold 1.7 million copies, still a record for an independent comic book.[18] The series continued to be a hit, and in 1993 Wizard declared Spawn "the best-selling comic on a consistent basis that is currently being published."[19]

Spawn was launched in 1992 with McFarlane as artist/writer for the first 7 issues. Guest writers Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Dave Sim and Frank Miller were brought on for issues 8 to 11 (respectively) while McFarlane continued as the artist. In order to concentrate on the 1994 Spawn/Batman crossover (with Miller writing), he brought on Grant Morrison (as writer) and Greg Capullo (penciller) from issues #16-#18. Then Andrew Grossberg and Tom Orzechowski took over writing issues No. 19 and 20 with Capullo still penciling. McFarlane returned as writer/artist for issue 21 and remained so until issue 24. Greg Capullo took over as pencil artist with issue 26, McFarlane remained writer and inker on the book until issue 70.

During Image's early years of operation, the company was subject to much industry criticism over aspects of his business practices, including late-shipped books and its creators' emphasis of art over writing. One of these critics was McFarlane's former Hulk collaborator, writer Peter David. This came to a head during a public debate they participated in at Philadelphia's Comicfest convention in October 1993, which was moderated by artist George Pérez. McFarlane stated that Image was not being treated fairly by the media, and by David in particular. The three judges, Maggie Thompson, editor of the Comics Buyer's Guide, William Christensen of Wizard Press, and John Danovich of the magazine Hero Illustrated, voted 2–1 in favor of David, with Danovich voting the debate a tie.[20]

McFarlane eventually would hand off scripting duties on Spawn (while still overseeing plotlines) to other writers, on occasion offering story input and covers inks. In 2008, he returned to co-plot the series with returning writer Brian Holguin, with issue 185.

In 2006 McFarlane announced plans for Spawn/Batman with artist Greg Capullo, which McFarlane wrote and inked, which paid tribute to Jack Kirby. He also began taking an active role in comics publishing again, publishing collections of his Spawn comics in paperback form. Spawn Collection Volume 1 collecting issues 1–12 minus issue 9 (due to royalty issues with Neil Gaiman) and 10 (due to a vow he made to Sim) was released in December 2005. The first volume achieved moderate success, ranking 17 in the top one hundred graphic novels, with pre-order sales of 3,227 for that period.[21]

Haunt, an ongoing series co-created by McFarlane and Robert Kirkman, was announced in 2007 and launched on October 7, 2009.[22] The comic was initially written by Kirkman, penciled by Ryan Ottley, and inked by McFarlane, with Greg Capullo providing layouts. McFarlane also contributed pencils to some issues, and co-wrote the issue No. 28, the series finale, with Joe Casey, who took over writing duties from Kirkman.[23]

Todd McFarlane Productions has also published multiple Spawn spin-off mini-series. McFarlane increasingly concentrated his own personal attention to those other ventures, which resulted in irregular work as an illustrator. By 1994, he ceased to be the regular illustrator of Spawn, and would only re-visit it sporadically.

That same year, McFarlane created McFarlane Toys. Its line of meticulously sculpted Spawn action figures changed the entire industry by focusing on more mature consumers and non-traditional action figure inspirations such as musicians. The company has licensed the right to produce action figures of athletes in all four major North American sports – baseball, hockey, football and basketball – and several recent, successful film franchises, including The Terminator, The Matrix and Shrek. He has also created figures of rock musicians, including the members of Kiss, Alice Cooper, Jim Morrison, and Jimi Hendrix and toys related to video games, like Halo 3.

In 1996, McFarlane founded Todd McFarlane Entertainment, a film and animation studio. In collaboration with New Line Cinema, it produced the 1997 Spawn film and a new Spawn movie, planned in 2008.[24]Spawn, while critically panned, was a modest box office success, earning $54.97 million domestically, a little over $69 million worldwide. It also produced the animated series Todd McFarlane's Spawn, (featuring voice work by actor Keith David) which aired on HBO from 1997 until 1999. The animated series received significantly more positive press than the film, received two Primetime Emmy awards (including Outstanding Animated Program For Programming More Than One Hour), and was a moderate success when eventually released on DVD.

On July 21, 2011 at San Diego Comic-Con International, McFarlane and Stan Lee debuted their new comic, Blood Red Dragon. The series is a collaboration with musician Yoshiki and stars a fictionalized version of him.[25]

McFarlane continues to be an avid baseball fan. In auctions, he bought record-breaking home-run balls from Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds, and after every ball was purchased, sports writers and connoisseurs deemed each ball virtually worthless. [10]

Todd McFarlane also allowed Spawn to appear as a guest character in the Xbox version of Soulcalibur II, and also designed the unique character Necrid for the game.

In January 2005, McFarlane announced that he was set to produce a half-hour anthology television series for Fox called Twisted Tales, based on the Bruce Jones' comic book to which McFarlane had purchased the rights.[38]

In December 2002, Todd McFarlane directed the music video "Breathe" for Canadian hip-hop group Swollen Members that featured Nelly Furtado. He later drew both the Canadian and International covers for their next album Heavy, released October 2003.

In "Spidey Cents", a fourth season episode of the History reality television series Pawn Stars, which aired in May 2011, a man tries to sell McFarlane's original artwork for page 25 of The Amazing Spider-Man No. 316 (June 1989) for $20,000 to the Gold & Silver Pawn Shop in Las Vegas. Because the seller lacked the paper work authenticating the artwork, Gold & Silver manager Corey Harrison would only pay $1,000 for the page, an offer that the seller declined.[14]

McFarlane lost judgments in two lawsuits in the 2000s. The first was a 2002 suit in which McFarlane contested with writer Neil Gaiman over the rights to some supporting Spawn characters created by Gaiman in issue No. 9 of the Spawn series and over payment for later works featuring those characters. In 1997 the two signed a deal in which Gaiman would give his share of characters Angela, Medieval Spawn and Cogliostro to McFarlane in exchange of McFarlane's share of British superhero Marvelman (in reality, what McFarlane actually owned were two trademarks for Miracleman logos, not the character, which would become clear only after the lawsuit concluded). However, this deal was broken by McFarlane, which motivated Neil Gaiman to start the lawsuit. The jury was unanimous in favor of Gaiman. The two were involved in a lengthy dispute over ownership of Miracleman, but no lawsuit has been filed in that dispute. In 2009, Marvel Comics brought resolution to the matter by purchasing the property.[41]

The second was a December 2004 suit in which hockey player Tony Twist sued Todd McFarlane because he named a mobster character in Spawn after Twist. The lawsuit was settled out of court for $5 million.[42][43]

As of late 2012, McFarlane is suing a former employee whose name is the same as the alter ego of Spawn, Al Simmons. According to a lawsuit lodged in Arizona federal court, the real Al Simmons published a book called The Art of Being Spawn, in which Simmons purportedly suggests that his own life was the inspiration for the Spawn character. McFarlane's position is that Simmons violated the terms of his employment pact and breached his duty of loyalty.[44][45]

Prior to forming Image Comics, McFarlane escaped to Arizona in order to avoid high Canadian taxes.[10] He and his wife Wanda live in the Ahwatukee Foothills of Phoenix, where they raised their three children: Cyan, Kate and Jake. Cyan's love of the TV series Lost inspired her father's decision to produce action figures based on that show, while Kate voiced the young Cyan in the animated Spawn TV series.[48]

^Manning, Matthew K.; Dolan, Hannah, ed. (2010). "1980s". DC Comics Year By Year A Visual Chronicle. Dorling Kindersley. p. 229. ISBN978-0-7566-6742-9. In 'Year Two', a four-part sequel [to "Batman: Year One"] set in Batman's second year as a crime fighter, writer Mike W. Barr and artists Alan Davis and Todd McFarlane challenged the Caped Crusader with the threat of the Reaper.

^Cowsill, Alan; Gilbert, Laura, ed. (2012). "1990s". Spider-Man Chronicle Celebrating 50 Years of Web-Slinging. Dorling Kindersley. p. 184. ISBN978-0756692360. Todd McFarlane was at the top of his game as an artist, and with Marvel's release of this new Spidey series he also got the chance to take on the writing duties. The sales of this series were underwhelming, with approx. 2.5 million copies eventually printing, including special bagged editions and a number of variant covers.

^Saffel, Steve (2007). "Mutant Menace". Spider-Man the Icon: The Life and Times of a Pop Culture Phenomenon. Titan Books. p. 173. ISBN978-1-84576-324-4. Marvel knew a good thing when they saw it, and the adjectiveless Spider-Man received Marvel's most aggressive launch in company history...the initial press run was 2.35 million, and 500,000 additional copies were printed to meet demand.